This Connect & Learn session on 1 July 2026 saw colleagues from across the North East and North Cumbria come together to explore ‘Leading system-level change – what next for our community?’.

Our Connect & Learns are a series of online learning events, planned with the purpose of sharing and spreading improvement work across the North East and North Cumbria health and care system.

A new report from the Northern Triangle explores the real-world challenge of leading change across health and care systems – where solutions lie beyond the control of any single organisation.

Rather than offering a simple framework, the research provides a powerful reflection of the lived experience of system leadership, highlighting the importance of relationships, shared learning, and collective leadership in driving meaningful change.

Boost is proud to feature in this work as a relational learning system – focused on building the “social glue” that enables improvement across partners and communities. This interactive Connect & Learn session:

• Shared a concise summary of the key insights from the research
• Explored what these findings mean in practice for our system
• Created space for reflection, learning, and contributions for developing the Boost learning community further

Most importantly, this session was an opportunity to continue the conversation as a community – recognising that system change doesn’t happen in isolation, but through how we learn and act together.

Boost will take the following actions forward from the discussions:

• Neighbourhood Health Community of Practice Development: Collaboratively build the Neighbourhood Health Leadership Community of Practice and define its structure and purpose.
• System Leadership Development Support: Develop support mechanisms or resources to help individuals transition from organisational manager roles to system leader roles, focusing on the required mindset and skills.
• Co-Production Best Practice Sharing: Facilitate sharing of effective co-production examples and help drive the development of co-production being embedded from the beginning of service change processes.
• Digital Platform Evaluation: Evaluate and consider adopting more effective digital platforms, such as the Futures platform, for cross-system engagement and collaboration.
• Good Practice Dissemination: Share examples of good collaborative practice, such as the Sunderland commissioning teams’ work, across the system to encourage wider adoption

Take a look at the recordings of our previous Connect & Learn sessions here, and our upcoming dates here…

If you would like to present and share your innovations/improvements across a wider platform, please get in touch.

• Co-Production
• Leadership
• Organisation Development
• Quality Improvement
• System Working